US and proxies cut off Food aid to Starving Gazans. What next!!

from thefreeonline on 29 Jan 2024 at United Nations for Palestine Refugees info from Al Jazeera

US and 8 followers cut funding to UNRWA after false Israeli claims that 12 workers collaborated with Hamas

Western countries support US and suspend aid to Gaza

“The depraved US and its cronies collaborate in Genocide of children because their elites hold huge stakes in Israeli riches”.

An UNRWA truck crosses into Egypt from Gaza, at the Rafah border crossing in the south of the enclave [File: Mohamed Abd El Ghany/Reuters]

2.4 million Palestinians are imprisoned in the tiny Gaza area in ‘Israel’, for 17 7ears under a strict blockade. Hamas is strictly Islamic but so what? They WON an election, were at first financed by Israel, and have wide support. Yes, the suicidal October 7th breakout caused deaths, on both sides. Yes, Hamas took hostages, but don’t forget Israel has OVER 5000 Palestinian captives held without trial. If Israel wants to control Palestinians it needs to give them citizenship for a start, stop massacring them, and pay for their survival aid and reconstruction. Anything less is Partition and inhuman Fascism.

A Palestinian girl carrying a child walks through debris at the site of Israeli attacks on a mosque and houses in Rafah in the southern Gaza Strip, January 25, 2024 [Ibraheem Abu Mustafa/Reuters]

The UN urges continued funding to UNRWA’s ‘lifesaving’ aid in Gaza, after Western countries cut aid to the agency.

The United States, which said 12 agency employees were under investigation, immediately suspended funding, followed by several other countries, including Britain, Germany, Canada, Australia, the Netherlands, Finland, Switzerland and Italy.

The United Nations agency for Palestinian refugees (UNRWA), considered a lifeline for two million people in the besieged enclave, has suffered funding cuts after several of its staff were accused by Israel of involvement in the October 7 Hamas attack.

Netanyahu meets Bezos

The UN on Saturday said that it had terminated nine out of 12 staff over the allegations and vowed to hold its employees accountable, but expressed its shock at the swift funding cut by several Western countries amid a humanitarian disaster in Gaza, which has been devastated by nearly four months of Israel’s aerial and ground war.

Don’t be fooled: Debunking some of the Most Tempting Greenwashing terms

Carbon Capture and Storage (CCS) is the fossil fuel industry’s plan B to keep profiting at the expense of the planet.

from thefreeonline by Mariana Abdalla on January 28, 2024 by 350.org

Awareness about the climate crisis has never been greater, and with that an accompanied sense of dread surrounding its implications for people and the planet.

Despite this, we are making progress: We have a clear path forward to get out of this mess.

For the first time ever, at COP28, “transition away from fossil fuels” was included in the final outcome of the 2023 UN Climate Talks, and more than 100 countries supported tripling renewable energy and doubling energy efficiency by 2030.

But we know that the fossil fuel industry and those with vested political and economic interests are trying really hard to oppose this path forward and find a way to continue with business as usual.

As a matter of fact, money and influence is being used to slow down progress by introducing dangerous distractions – technologies still unproven, expensive and complex to construct for most, especially in countries in parts of Africa, South America and Asia.

Here are a few terms we heard during COP28 that it is crucial we debunk in order to have a real shot at keeping temperatures at 1.5C, in line with the Paris Agreement.

Carbon Capture and Storage (CCS)

Carbon Capture and Storage (CCS) is the fossil fuel industry’s plan B to keep profiting at the expense of the health of the planet.

It is claimed to be a technology that reduces the climate impact of burning fossil fuels by capturing the carbon dioxide pollution before it reaches the atmosphere and then burying it underground.

But what the fossil fuel industry doesn’t say is that the capacity for this technology, worldwide, is equivalent to less than 1% of what is emitted from fossil fuels per year.

Studies have also shown that depending on CCS to cut emissions will cost governments $30 trillion more than a route based mainly on renewable energy, such as wind and solar.

Exxon, for instance, features their carbon capture efforts on their website and calls themselves “the global leader in carbon capture and storage”.

But they’re also one of the top 10 companies in the world responsible for global emissions, which far surpass the total amount of carbon captured and what they invest in “low carbon” projects – less than 5% of their multi billion dollar profits.

And the problems don’t end there. 81% of carbon captured to date has been used to extract more oil from existing wells by pumping the captured carbon into the ground to force out more oil. Currently, some CCS is also done through tree plantations – the burden of which typically falls on the Global South, putting pressure on food systems and land conflicts even though these countries have done little to cause the climate crisis.

Anything that allows burning to continue is fundamentally not on the scale of change we need and replicates a broken and extractive system. Dangerous distractions like CCS risk extending the life of the failing fossil fuel industry, and present no realistic solution for a full, quick, fair and just energy transition for all.

Emissions abatement, Carbon Neutrality and Carbon Credits

These terms allude not to cutting, but reducing emissions. They also allude to still unproven, costly and sometimes even harmful methods like reforestation.

Instead of actually lowering emissions, companies are able to hit their “net-zero targets” by claiming that the carbon they have emitted has been “offset” by something else, like planting trees. ⁠

Not only does this method fail to tackle the negative social and environmental impacts of fossil fuel extraction and burning, these projects can also notoriously displace communities, aggravate land conflicts, disrupt food systems and harm biodiversity.⁠

Open toxic pool in the the Ecuadorean Amazon rainforest near Lago Agrio. Photo: Caroline Bennett, RAN

The science is clear: reducing emissions is not enough. Even if these methods and technologies were cheap and scalable, and didn’t risk predatory and colonialist practices, fossil fuel emissions have no place in urgently scaling up the renewable energy transition. Unless we completely phase out of fossil fuels, we will not reach the target we need to keep the planet safe.

Nuclear energy

Large-scale energy technologies like nuclear power plants require billions of dollars upfront, take an average of 8 years to build, and waste management is extremely tricky.

In Japan, we are still experiencing the impacts of the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear disaster that happened in 2011. It led to the evacuation and displacement of over 150,000 people, exposure of many to radioactivity, contamination of land and water, astronomical clean-up and radioactive waste costs, impacts on agricultural and fishery livelihoods – the list goes on.

With nuclear, when things go wrong, they go very, very wrong.

Hinkley Point C could be delayed to 2031 and cost up to £35bn,/ Three-year extension agreed to Hinkley

Also, nuclear uses centralized technology, governance, and decision-making processes, concentrating the distribution of power in the hands of the few.

As we build the world we want, transferring ownership and control of renewable energy infrastructure from private monopolies increasingly to communities and the public sector or small and medium enterprises, will allow for electricity to be produced close to where it would be consumed, and communities and workers would directly benefit from improved energy access and governance.

What can get us where we need to be in time?

We know exactly what we can and need to do.

Even the fossil fuel industry knows that we need to fully transition from fossil fuels and into decentralized renewable energy solutions like wind and solar, which have proven to be safe, already cheaper than any fossil fuel plant and scalable.

And we must not replace one broken system with another.

For those that are often at the forefront of the climate crisis, in order to power up renewables, rich countries need to invest in countries in Africa, Latin America and parts of Asia seven times the current levels and their debt needs to be canceled.

When we scale up renewable energy solutions, the demand for raw materials and minerals will inevitably rise.

Not only do we need democratic and transparent regulation for them but as we move forward, we must also explore ways to reduce the need for these materials and scale down less-necessary forms of production.

In sum; We need to advocate for policies that incentivize and support the widespread adoption of decentralized and community-led wind and solar technologies. Also, we need massive investment in research and development of renewable energy, energy storage and energy efficiency measures. These solutions can contribute to a diversified and resilient energy landscape and are crucial steps toward achieving a clean and just energy future.

Poor Things: meet Alasdair Gray- the radical Scottish visionary behind the new hit film

from thefreeonline on 28th Jan 2024 by Prof Joe Jackson at the Conversation

A radical painter and writer, Alasdair Gray’s work was full of bold visions for an independent Scotland

Emma Stone’s Bella Baxter Stares Into Your Soul

Bella Baxter could be read as an incarnation of Gray’s vision for a defiant and free Scotland.

Director Yorgos Lanthimos’s Poor Things tells the story of Bella Baxter (Emma Stone), an irrepressibly free woman who seems to have the mind of an innocent child. She embarks on an exuberant voyage of discovery, travelling around 19th-century Europe and reaching Egypt, experiencing many new things as her intellect rapidly develops, before returning home to face her secret past.

The film is based on the 1992 novel of the same name by the Glaswegian Alasdair Gray, a modern-day William Blake, a dissident maverick and polymath..

Gray was a writer, artist, polemicist, and civic nationalist – who had an immense influence on contemporary Scottish literature and beyond.

Like watching Lanthimos’s gorgeous spectacle, reading Gray is a wild and unsettling ride. His work is full of progressive imagination, wry impropriety and intricate literary form.

Gray was a bold creative thinker, one who dared to make a slightly disreputable character out of God, for instance. He was a radical who disturbed established order, including through the blending of visual and literary art.

For him, naming and contesting arbitrary power and providing both visceral witness to, and alternative visions of, contemporary society are defining qualities of his work – particularly Poor Thing

A Scottish Frankenstein

Rather than a single perspective, Poor Things is made up of different documents stitched together – prefaces, journal entries, letters, explanatory footnotes – that produce multiple, competing stories. The story is self-reflexive, where the narrative voice or action dwell on the act of writing or making fiction.

Poor Things is full of allusions to, and borrowings from, the rich resources of Victorian fiction – most obviously Frankenstein – and reference works. Typographical experimentation and word play abound.

For instance, the name of the novel’s great medical scientist Godwin Baxter is sometimes abbreviated to “God” to emphasise paternalism, powers of creation, withdrawal from the world and many other interpretations.